Interview with the creator of Google News

Because we get 100,000 articles a day. A human editor couldn't read that many. We have people who try to create an aggregate of what's been done in the media on a given topic and they write a report about it. Journalists do that all the time, and they do an extremely good job. But imagine doing that for every story in the world, every time. We want to give you speed in addition to timeliness.

He goes follows up with this

I want this to be a force for a democracy. I want us to be an honest broker, and I want newspapers featured on our site to get traffic from us. … There's never been a more controversial time on the planet. I think it's great to be a news source at this point because there's so much hunger for news. You see a lot more diversity in the news coverage on our site than on others. I think the diversity is a mirror to the diversity of opinion there is worldwide. One of the things that makes us objective is we show all points of view. Even if you disagree with one, we give you both -- the majority and the minority point of view. The ones you don't agree with are education. It's nice to know what the other side is thinking. You'll see left-leaning ones as much as much as you see right-leaning ones. Frankly, the software doesn't know the difference between left and right, which is good.

Link

Interview with Eugene Peterson in Christianity Today

The deeper problem, Peterson said, is that two things that are basic to the Christian life run counter to the American ethos. First, the Christian life is not about us, but about God. It is not like giving ourselves a makeover. "We're in on it, but we're not the subject or the action," Peterson said. Ever notice how in the Bible, we always come in after a preposition? God with us, in us, for us. In an individualistic, commercial culture, where the self is the center of everything, an autonomous agent of transformation, we have lost this grammar of shalom—what Peterson called "prepositional participation."

The second principle of the Christian life that runs against the grain of American culture, Peterson said, is that the ways and means must be appropriate to the ends. "We can't participate in God's work if we insist on doing it our own way." He cited two examples of "doing the right thing the wrong way": congregation and Scripture. We consider both to be our matters, not God's. Instead of forming communities that embody self-denial, sacrifice, and patience for God to become present in them, we form "consumer churches," using commercial methods to attract people and cater to their wants. And rather than reading Scripture as a way of "listening to God revealing God," we treat it as information for us to process to become more successful and enlightened people. In both cases, the ways and means—bowing to the gods of salesmanship and efficiency—are out of sync with the ends—forming a community of believers submitting to God's work within them.

Link

Candidates fail to use Net successfully

The online-funded and Internet-energized candidacies of Howard Dean and Wesley Clark have drawn a lot of attention to the power of digital campaigning.
So why haven't local candidates taken better advantage of the Net?
Presidential hopefuls have drawn on three basic mechanisms to promote their candidacies: Web sites, e-mail lists and Web logs. They have drawn some criticism for spamming, but in reality their use of e-mail has relied on a filtered "friends and colleagues" network, which has forwarded e-mail among known parties.
Locally, though, the Net remains underused by candidates. This is surprising in Washington, which with Oregon has the strongest Internet usage — with 68 percent of the public logging on — in the U.S., according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. And the Net reaches a more-educated public, which is likelier to vote.
A few of the candidates on the Sept. 16 ballot had Web sites. They're an important first step, but Web sites hardly tap the power of the Internet. They tend to be the online equivalent of a campaign brochure.
Nothing from candidates reached my mailbox in terms of e-mail "doorbelling" that the presidential candidates have leveraged. And a potentially powerful political tool — the Web log — is virtually nonexistent on the local level.
Curious as to why, I talked to some local political organizers. The nagging term "resources" kept coming up. Candidacies are expensive. Candidates are crushingly busy. Internet "presence" takes time and money.
While that may be true, it ignores the relative efficiencies, particularly financially, of the Web. Consider the possibilities...

Here is the rest of the article

Sadly it is the same here in Saskatoon. None of the local candidates are using the web well. It is embarrasing really. Even the mayor can't be bothered with even putting up a website.

I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want

I finally got around and created an Amazon Wish List.

Parker Vector Rollerball Pens

I don't hold onto a lot of possessions really tightly. Wendy and I have given away a lot of stuff and I really don't think that much about it. Actually a lot of my friends are like that. Today was Spicy Soup today and one of the things that is really cool about it is a lack of money never really ever keeps anyone away. Someone else just buys it because we know it all evens out. Several times I have gone to pay for things only for the person behind the till to tell me it was already taken care of. Cool stuff. Back to the pens. We never really grew up with much money and one thing that I always cherished was that I would save some money and purchase a five dollar Parker Vector Rollerball pen and I felt like I was worth a million dollars. A couple of weeks ago I decided that I wouldn't mind one again and I couldn't find them anywhere in Saskatoon. Actually I was dismayed by how bland most pens look now and how much molded plastic goes into them. I found some pens on eBay (they are hard to find online) and have been bidding on and off on them. I got "sniped" earlier today for a stainless steel one but I am waiting for the right one to come along. Who knows, I may like it so much that I may give up the blog for a while and go back to writing things out longhand. Oh wait, a decade of notebook computers and using Palm's has taken away my ability to write anything. So maybe the blog will live another day.

David and Melissa Hopkins Are Expecting

That is so cool. The Monkhouse gets a little more crowded.

Have someone that is hard to shop for?

oneshare.com allows you to purchase a single share and have it framed for someone in about 100 different companies from Apple and Amazon.com to Caterpillar and Harley Davidson. It is a legal share and kind of a cool idea.

Next Indie Allies Meetup in 14 Days

Head over to the IndieAllies Website and make sure you sign up and vote for the next Meetup location. The list is at 1320 people and growing. It doesn't cost a thing and is a great way to connect with some other postmoderns near you.

David Gray

Wendy and I have heard Matt and Jesika Reimer talk about David Gray and seeing him in concert but we had never heard his music. A couple of weeks ago we were at Todd and Corina (a former Chokecherry Festival Princess) and I asked who I was enjoinging playing on the CD player and it was David Gray. After passing on his CD a couple of times (it was $25.99), we finally found a reasonably priced one at McNally Robinson yesterday. What an amazing CD.

Two Realities

Tom Friedman servies up this on Iraq today as well

"You talkin' to us? This is your war, pal. We told you before about Iraq: You break it alone, you own it alone. Well, you broke it, now you own it. We've got you over a barrel, because you and your taxpayers have no choice but to see this through, so why should we pay? If you make Iraq a success, we'll all enjoy the security benefits. We'll all get a free ride. And if you make a mess in Iraq, all the wrath will be directed at you and you alone will foot the bill. There is a fine line between being Churchill and being a chump, and we'll let history decide who you are. In the meantime, don't expect us to pay to watch. We were all born at night — but not last night."
Oh, I suspect if the U.S. manages to secure some new U.N. resolution giving more cover to the U.S. reconstruction of Iraq, we will scrounge up a few Indian or Turkish soldiers and maybe a few dollars, but nothing that will make a real dent in the $87 billion price tag the Bush team has presented to the American people.
Sorry folks, we broke it, we own it, and the worst thing we could do now is start shortchanging ourselves. There is a move in Congress to fully finance that part of the $87 billion for U.S. troops in Iraq, but to slash the $20 billion for Iraqi schools and reconstruction. That would be a big mistake. It is that $20 billion that is the key to getting out and leaving behind a reasonably stable, self-governing Iraq.
As if this weren't enough for one week, the U.S. public also got a lesson in wars of choice. It was administered by David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector who has been leading the U.S. team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Last week Mr. Kay gave an interim report indicating that in four months of searching in Iraq he has found none of the W.M.D. that President Bush cited as his principal reason for going to war.
What this means for the American people is this: The war to oust Saddam Hussein was always a war of choice (a good choice, I believe). But democracies don't like to fight wars of choice, and, if they do, they want them to be quick sprints, like Bosnia, Kosovo or Grenada — not marathons. Knowing this, the Bush team tried to turn Iraq into a war of necessity by hyping the threat Saddam may have posed with W.M.D.
With Mr. Kay's interim report, it is now becoming clear that this was not a war of necessity at all, it was a war of choice, and, on top of it all, it was a war of choice that is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. And, because the Bush team chose to start this marathon largely alone, the free-riding world is going to let us finish it, and pay for it, largely alone.

Iraqi Family Life

An excellent article about Iraqi family complexity at Baghdad Burning.

Worship Freehouse Injury Report

It was disclosed today that Todd Peters played the guitar and lead worship with a broken knuckle. He may not be the most talented rock star but his is among the toughest. Sure David Crowder is richer but is he tough enough to play with a broken hand. I don't think so. Link

Stealth Disco

So wrong on so many levels. I'll have to try it at Soularize. Via Joi Ito

Emergent Political Advertising

Steven Johnson has a great blog post about grassroots political ads created with desktop tools. He created a cool quicktime mock ad for the Clark campaign. I think some of the Canadian elections ongoing should take Johnson's ideas seriously. It kind of reminds me, there is an election coming up here in Saskatchewan. That being said, none of the Saskatchewan campaigns have even bothered to blog. I won't get my hopes up.

Speaking of election blogs. The Ontario election has turned into a landslide so there probably won't be any analysis of the impact of the Liberal blog and non-official blogs like Warren Kinsella's had. While I am talking about the Ontairio Liberals, they have the most annoying URL. Is it www.liberal.on.ca, www.liberals.on.ca, www.ontarioliberals.ca, www.ontarioliberals.on.ca, www.ontarioliberal.ca, or www.ontarionliberal.on.ca. It is the last one, despite the fact that one the title bar it says, Ontario Liberals. My advice to the Ontario Liberal Party, get all of them for the next election. Oh yeah, www.choosechange.ca also works.

Really Bad PowerPoint Presentations and How to Avoid Them

Here is a PDF of Seth Godin's e-book. As he says in the book, pass it along but If you find it helpful, buy the PDF for $2 from Amazon.com. The problem isn't PowerPoint but rather how we use it and he offers up some rules for better PowerPoint. Link to Seth Godin's website and his blog.

The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide

Is there anything so deadening to the soul as a PowerPoint presentation? Not according to the New York Times.

Worship Freehouse

Well, Todd didn't drop his gloves. He was a victim of a vicious slash (after he threw and elbow to a guy's face). His hand was a horrible blue color but he played. He couldn't do one song but he was still amazing anyways. Our metaphor was the noise that keeps us from hearing God last night. We used some worship tricks from Grace and Jonny Baker and it was an amazing night all around. Cathy, Gloria, and Leighton did some readings which I thought were all excellent. Jeb brought some media he created from before that fit in well too. Wendy made 50 prayer ropes for the event. Those were really cool.

Link: Worship Freehouse

Today

Nice service in Spiritwood today. Am off to the Worship Freehouse right away. Will post some pics of it tonight. Am looking forward to it. Rumor is our worship leader dropped his gloves at hockey and hurt his hand. What do you say about that? It's tonight at 8 at the Bassment.

1317

mp3's on the RCA LyraHD Jukebox now. That should get me to Spiritwood and back.

This is different

Web Evangelism Toolbox, a widely read e-zine on webministry mentions Hockey Pundits

STAY LIQUID - a problem with many sites is that they are not 'liquid' at different screen resolutions, with graphics or fixed-size page elements forcing horizontal scrollbars at lower screen resolutions. Very irritating for users.
Here's a fun trick to maintain a full-width header block which appears to be solid graphic. But in fact it isn't - resize the browser window, and it remains full width at any resolution. The trick is to use a graphic as a background in one of the table cells.
http://www.hockeypundits.com/

Kudos to Jeb who redesigned the site.

Pilger claims White House knew Saddam was no threat

Australian investigative journalist John Pilger says he has evidence the war against Iraq was based on a lie which could cost George W Bush and Tony Blair their jobs and bring Prime Minister John Howard down with them.
A television report by Pilger aired on British screens last night said US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice confirmed in early 2001 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been disarmed and was no threat.
But after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 that year, Pilger claimed Rice said the US "must move to take advantage of these new opportunities" to attack Iraq and claim control of its oil.
Pilger uncovered video footage of Powell in Cairo on February 24, 2001 saying, "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."
Two months later, Rice reportedly said, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
Powell boasted this was because America's policy of containment and its sanctions had effectively disarmed Saddam.
Pilger claims this confirms that the decision of US President George W Bush - with the full support of British Prime Minister Blair and Howard - to wage war on Saddam because he had weapons of mass destruction was a huge deception.

He also says this

In his report, Pilger interviews Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA officer and friend of Bush's father and ex-president, George Bush senior.
McGovern told Pilger that going to war because of weapons of mass destruction "was 95 per cent charade."
Pilger also claims that six hours after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he wanted to "hit" Iraq and allegedly said "Go Massive ... Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
He was allegedly talked down by Powell who said the American people would not accept an attack on Iraq without any evidence, so they opted to invade Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had bases.
Pilger claimed war was set in train on September 17, 2001 when Bush signed a paper directing the Pentagon to explore the military options for an attack on Iraq.

Link to the full story

Worst Movie of the Summer

Leave your vote in the message boards.

Maple Leaf's Skate for Easter Seals

I posted a fairly harsh commentary about the Toronto Maple Leaf's decision to cancel their annual skate with the kids for Easter Seals. Fellow Hockey Pundit Chris Corrigan posted his story when he was nine years old. It is about everything that is right about hockey then and is wrong about it now.

One of my greatest memories of Maple Leaf Gardnes was skating in an Easter Seals Skatathon when I was 9 years old. Bobby Orr was there, and as we skated around the rink he made sure to skate one full lap with each kid. Even though he had retired by then, he was still an idol of mine and it was an unbelieveable thrill to skate with him on the ice at the Gardens at age nine, just shooting the breeze like a couple of old friends. True story:
"You play hockey?" he asked me.
"Sure, house league."
"What number do you wear?"
I smile. "Four," I say becasue it was true.
He smiles too.
Can you imagine that?

A very cool story and it is sad that Maple Leaf fans won't be able to tell those stories anymore. Stupid move by Leafs management.

Bill Gates in Africa

From the NY Times

The buzz among African aid workers is that Mr. Gates will be remembered more for his work fighting disease than for Windows. Certainly the wealth of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is improving the prospect that vaccines will be found for malaria and AIDS. The foundation's most banal work is with vaccines, but those programs have already given out vaccines that will save 300,000 lives.
Hey, that's better than most rapacious monopolists do.
AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis are all worsening in the third world and now kill a combined six million people per year. This slaughter is one of the central moral challenges we face today, yet Western governments have abdicated responsibility, and Western medical science is uninterested in diseases that kill only poor people. Many times more money addresses erectile dysfunction than malaria.
So at least somebody is stepping up to the plate.
"It's unfortunate in a way that because of geography malaria has been wiped out in the rich world," Mr. Gates mused with typical political incorrectness. When Mr. Gates made his first tentative donation to malaria research, he found he'd raised the global budget by 50 percent.
"The grand challenge," he said, "is to tilt to some degree the way I.Q. goes to take on diseases."
While Mr. Gates may be richer than Croesus, he has a few qualities that partly make up for that. He bounces along in minibuses rather than limousines, eats sandwiches on his lap (crumbs flying) and eschews police escorts; in rural Mozambique, we were stopped briefly at a police checkpoint.
Mrs. Gates seems considerably more normal than her husband; for pleasure, she never reads Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and she cradles African babies without seeming to examine them for a power switch. In meetings, she relentlessly brings up the plight of girls and women, and my guess is that it is partly because of her influence that the Gates Foundation is pushing hard for microbicides, which would enable a woman to protect herself from H.I.V. even if her partner refuses to use a condom.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Gates denied my suggestion that she had educated him on gender disparities. Mr. Gates portrayed himself as an enlightened husband who washes the dishes at home each night. (Mrs. Gates confirmed this, although she seemed a bit less certain that it was every night; at this point, Mr. Gates looked wounded and became a mite defensive.)

I think this is cool and I agree with the writer that Gates' time may be better spent combatting AIDS that fighting with Sun but that's not the point. He is at least stepping up and being part of the fight. Why is it everyone else except the western church that is getting that? I know that many do get it but by in large we have sat this out. I wonder what has happened. Samantha Power in her book, The Problem from Hell, she talks of how the church responded to the earlier genocides in this century but as the century went on, the church lost interest in helping refugees or providing relief to victims of crimes against humanity. I wonder why we have lost interest in helping the poor, oppressed, and brutalized. Whether by war, AIDS, or poverty. Post about church structure or ministry and the comments come alive. Post about "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless..." and we all look the other way.

The Ulimate Software Enviroment

This is cool. via Jason Kottke

Darn Librarians!

From the NYT

Last week, Attorney General John Ashcroft named librarians as the latest group to pose a threat to freedom. Rather than lash out at well-intentioned critics, the administration should listen to the thoughtful voices from across the political spectrum who are saying we need less Patriot Act, not more.

We all know much of the world's problems can be traced back to the librarians.

Michael Moore Responds to His Critics Regarding 'Bowling for Columbine'

I've enjoyed reading these inventions/mistakes about this "Michael Moore." I mean, who wouldn't want to fantasize about living in penthouses roughhousing with brothers you never had. But lately I've begun to see so many things about me or my work that aren't true. It's become so easy to spread these fictions through the internet (thanks mostly to lazy reporters or web junkies who do all their research by typing in "key words" and then just repeat the same mistakes). And so I wonder that if I don't correct the record, then all of the people who don't know better may just end up being filled with a bunch of stuff that isn't true.

Of course, it would take a lot of my time to contact all these sites and media outlets to correct their errors and I think it's more important I spend my time on my next book or movie so I just let it ride. But is that fair to you, the reader, who has now been told something that isn't true?

With the unexpected and overwhelming success of "Bowling for Columbine" and "Stupid White Men," the fiction that has been written or spoken about me and my work has reached a whole new level of storytelling. It's no longer about making some simple errors or calling me "Roger" Moore. It is now about organized groups going full blast trying to discredit me by knowingly making up lies and repeating them over and over in the hopes that people will believe them – and, then, stop listening to me.

Link to the rest of the article

Eric Raymond Fires Back at SCO

Late yesterday. I learned that you have charged that your company is the victim of an insidious conspiracy masterminded by IBM. You have urged the press and public to believe that the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat and Novell and various Linux enthusiasts are up in arms not because of beliefs or interests of their own, but because little gray men from Armonk have put them up to it. Bwahahaha! Fire up the orbital mind-control lasers!

Very few things could possibly illustrate the brain-boggling disconnect between SCO and reality with more clarity than hearing you complain about how persecuted your company is. You opened this ball on 6 March by accusing the open-source community of criminality and incompetence as a way to set up a lawsuit against IBM. You have since tried to seize control of our volunteer work for your company's exclusive gain, and your lawyers have announced the intention to destroy not just the GPL but all the open-source licenses on which our community is built. It's beyond me how can have the gall to talk as though we need funding or marching orders from IBM to mobilize against you. IBM couldn't stop us from mobilizing!

I'm not sure which possibility is more pathetic — that the CEO of SCO is lying through his teeth for tactical reasons, or that you genuinely aren't capable of recognizing honest outrage when you see it. To a manipulator, all behaviors are manipulation. To a conspirator, all opposition is conspiracy. Is that you? Have you truly forgotten that people might make common cause out of integrity, ethical considerations, or simple self-defense? Has the reality you inhabit truly become so cramped and ugly?

Link to the rest of the open letter The comments are a fun read as well as many miss the humor in some of it, especially the people who responded from Utah.

Now that is a lot of corn

From Yahoo! News Link

Wahoo!

The IndieAllies just broke 1300. It would be huge if we could be over 1500 for our next gathering. If you haven't signed up, sign up today!

Noise

signal vs. noise is our theme at this Sunday's Worship Freehouse. Here is one of the readings we are using for the time together. It is quite powerful.

noise is unwanted sound
which is why your parents call the music you like noise

but noise isn't just about sound
it's about information
noise is whatever drowns out or interferes with or conceals
meaningful information
sound engineers, radio engineers speak of two things, signal and noise
the signal is the message, the meaningful part of your transmission
the noise is all the unwanted stuff that interferes with your
ability to hear or decipher the signal
our lives are full of noise
too much information
too many messages that don't add up to any coherent while
all competing for our attention we can't find signal or make
any sense of our lives

and so we go into the dessert to escape the noise

but then we can hear our internal noise
some of which is very gross especially during silent prayer
and some of which is subtle but more deeply disturbing
like tinnitus which is nerve damage to the inner ear resulting in a
permanent whistling or hissing noise inside your head that
you can never escape

and that's just the physical noise inside us

but our heads are full of mental noise
the thoughts that won't stop chattering that stupid song that
you can't get out of your head that nagging worry about
something you said or didn't say
that hurt and anger that you can't let go of, churning inside you
when your're supposed to be concentrating on work that
dumb joke that makes you giggle on the bus so that people
look at you strangely. . .
and when you're alone you can't pretend any more that any of
there were necessary
so you try and put them aside and pray

and now you become aware of spiritual noise

all those things that compete with god
distracting your attention towards selfish or worldly concerns
drowning out your attempts to hear god's voice distorting the message
or making you lose bits like a mobile phone passing under a bridge

sin is a kind of spiritual tinnitus
the closer we get to god's silence the more we are aware of
the unceasing whine within ourselves
of want and need and hurt and self
trouble is we've lost the volume knob and anyway we're
scared of silence because without all the activity and
distractions
we'll have to face ourselves and god and we are frightened of
what we might find
but god longs to heal us
to still the oscilloscopes of our souls
turn the noise off
and give us peace
because only then
will we be able to hear
the music of heaven

taken from Alternative Worship by Jonny Baker, Doug Gay and Jenny Brown

Tory staff update resumes, fearing election loss

Tory staffers prepare for Eves to lose

As Ontario's Conservatives continued to trail in public opinion polls, dozens of Tory aides, including senior staff, have been shopping their resumes around ahead of the Oct. 2 election.
Among them are members of the office of Premier Ernie Eves, senior members of Finance Minister Janet Ecker's staff, and an administrative assistant in Education Minister Elizabeth Witmer's office.
Many of the resumes — posted electronically on workopolis.com or monster.ca — have been updated in the past week or two, and several in just the past few days.

So much for going down with the ship.

Youth at the Gate

The revolution has begun

Just as the post-World war II Baby Boomers of the TV generation dictated the economic, political and business agenda of its time, today's Net generation—the first to be born into an all-digital world—is developing its own culture and is just starting to impose it on the workplace.
Some 80 million strong in the U.S. alone, the N-generation is the offspring of the children of the boomers. They're the Baby Boom "echo." Yet what makes them formidable is not so much their sheer numbers or technology acumen as much as their attitude toward authority. This generation, now between the ages of 6 and 26, thinks differently, behaves differently and is already starting to demand, aggressively, big changes in the way society, business and individuals interact. Is your workplace prepared for the changes?

Acumen Fund

Seth Godin pointed me towards the Acumen Fund page.

Acumen Fund is a not-for-profit enterprise focused on improving the lives of the poor around the world. We operate like a venture capital firm - investing philanthropic resources in innovative social entrepreneurs through three thematic portfolios - with a goal of social change rather than financial return.

A great idea to start off your weekend.

Spencer Burke on starting Church

He is part of his journey

As far as program goes, we don’t have one and you know what? I’m okay with that—well, not really, but I’m trying. Although some would say we’re taking the easy way out—planting a church overnight with no set plan—I’m actually finding it extremely difficult. I mean, where I come from, planting a church means months—if not years—of planning, 50 families and at least $25,000 in start-up money. At the very least, it means filing a 501C3 and declaring yourself an official religious organization. And yet, we have none of those things. In fact, we’re breaking pretty much every conventional church-planting rule I know. Why? Because we want to be ministers of the gospel, not “add-ministers.” We want to be of service, not just a service (i.e. Sunday event). But I’d be lying if I said it was easy to let go of the program; it’s not.

It’s funny, the other night we talked about giving. Would we take up an offering? Would we have a church bank account? In the end, we decided against these things and instead, determined that we would all just give to people when we saw needs. So a few days ago my son was out playing and decided to give away the five coins that were rattling around in his pocket. He saw a need, I guess. He literally gave his offering to another kid. He didn’t make stewardship the responsibility of the church administrator or some committee; he just did it.

Colin Thatcher's Faint Hope Hearing

My first vivid memory of moving to Saskatoon in 1984 was the drought. The second was the grasshoppers. The third was the Colin Thatcher trial. It dominated my grade five class and the entire province. My mom knew Thatcher growing up. My uncle insists he saw him driving his Corvette the day that Jo-Ann Wilson was murdered (my uncle had some credibility problems of his own and was never called to the stand). For many in Saskatchewan, it was the trial of the century. Now he is before the courts again with a "faint-hope" hearing. Still maintaining his innocense. It seems like yesterday but it has been 19 years already and he won't be getting out anytime soon. Outside of a couple of Thatchers in the province, I don't think anyone really thinks he is innocent and very few people will mourn this decision

"Mr. Thatcher, I've done my best to provide an opportunity for a full and fair hearing," Court of Queen's Bench Justice Ross Wimmer said as the hearing wrapped up Thursday. "It just didn't work out for you."

Time flies when you are free to walk the street. I think it drags a bit when you are behind bars for the rest of your life. In two years he is eligible for another faint hope hearing.

Chatting with the Lakeview Staff today

This morning I met most of Lakeview Church's staff tonight in the poorest neighborhood in town and talked a little about what a wealthy suburban ministry can do in the inner city. Lakeview does a great job in helping out with clothing exchanges, food hampers, and plethora of other care related ministries but part of me wonder when I look at the demographics why the problem is as bad as it is. I think Lakeview could give a 1000 times more stuff and the problem wouldn't be solved. This evening I parked the car and I walked down the street and put up some Worship Freehouse posters. Barred windows, fences around churches, and a lot of other things that scream, don't hang out here. The other thing is that all of these people would chat with me. Ask me what I was postering. Ask me about the Worship Freehouse. They weren't looking for a handout, just a conversation.
Leighton said something very profound to me the other day when we were talking about poverty. He said something to the effect of, "the government can give money but it can't love the needy". I told that to Lakeview's staff today and I read them this interview with Eugene Peterson,

If someone were to come to you and say, "I want to immerse myself in this way of pastoring and living—give me a way to start doing this," how might you direct them?
There are basic things like developing a prayer life and keeping a Sabbath. I think keeping a Sabbath is a big thing, because it breaks the cycle of obsessiveness when, one day a week, you aren't going to do anything.
Here's one thing that I've done with a few people and I think it's worth thinking about. I tell these men and women, "Wherever you are, pick five people in your congregation who might be considered 'losers.' They don't contribute anything to the church. They are apathetic. They are eccentric. Nobody particularly likes them. Now make them your best friends. Spend a lot of time with them. Get to know those people as children of God. They are not going to help you build your church. They are not going to give you any emotional gratification. That is your training ground for paying attention without a reward. Actually, it doesn't cost anything. It's not a huge expenditure of time. You visit these people once every two weeks. But your view of what a congregation is changes radically when you do that.
How so?
Well, our culture says you go after the winners. You get the glamorous people. You find the people who are going to help you develop a church. So spend your time with the leaders. That is a basic leadership thing in our country. But what did Jesus do? He hung out with the losers. I remember we had a financial campaign for our building. We went through three building campaigns while I was with this congregation. One of my elders came to me and said, "Now Eugene, this is really important. I want you to visit the people who have the capacity to give. I want to you really work with them. We've got to get this campaign going." I went away from that and thought, "You know, I don't think I'm going to do that." So for the next six months I didn't visit anybody who had any leadership ability or ability to give. I spent my time with the widows, the unemployed, just to break the seduction of that. It didn't make any difference; we still got the money we needed. But I think it would have hurt me; every time I looked at somebody, I would have been thinking, "How much can we get from him?"

Jeb and I drove back to Lakeview and we were talking about how do we live this out. Coaching in the Saskatoon Kinsmen Hockey League is a way. Renting a school gym and playing late night floor hockey on Friday nights. Helping flood an outdoor rink. Volunteer to be a Big Brother or Big Sister. Volunteer at an afterschool program. Offer some art classes. Some music lessons. Make them free. Take Alpha out of your local church and take it on the road. Instead of coffee, provide a kick butt supper and don't care if they come and eat and leave. Through some really great parties. Peterson suggests this.

There is so much depersonalization and functionalization in our culture. These people deserve to have their name known. They deserve to have somebody who is a spiritual guide and a preacher and a pastor to them who has had a cup of coffee in their kitchen. There is so much alienation, so much loneliness around us. Classically, that’s what a pastor does. We’ve lost that. Of course, some people think I’m out to lunch because we don’t do that in America. We do something big and influential and cost-efficient. Well, a pastoral life is not cost-efficient, I’ll tell you. You don’t spend three hours in a nursing home and come away feeling like you’ve been cost-efficient.

The other thing is that as a church, we need to speak against a system that produces and keeps down the "losers" in our culture. Subsistence living is wrong. We celebrate those who pledge $100,000.00 to a building campaign but when was someone challenged to turn that money into building a community? Wendy and I had this discussion lately. She works at Safeway and everyone knows that Safeway costs more. At the same time she works with three single moms that have managed to save up enough money to own their own homes. You can't do that on $7 an hour, no matter how many church financial managemet seminars you go to. It is really complicated. I know that minimum wage's impact on the economy and small business but we have to start asking better questions and start living by the answers. It doesn't provide all the answers but Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed is a good place to look for some better questions

Self-self restraint becomes more of a challenge when the owner of a million-dollar condo (that’s my guess anyway, because it has three floors and a wide-angle view of the fabled rockbound coast) who is (according to a framed photograph on the wall) an acquaintance of the real Barbara Bush takes me into the master bathroom to explain the difficulties she’s been having with the shower stall. Seems its marble walls have been “bleeding” onto the brass fixtures, and can I scrub the grouting extra hard? That's not you marble bleeding, I want to tell her, it’s the worldwide working class--the people who quarried the marble, wove your Persian rugs until they went blind, harvested the apples in your lovely fall-themed dining room centerpiece, smelted the steel for your nails, drove the trucks, put up the building, and now bend and squat and seat to clean it.
Not that I, even in my more histrionic moments, imagine that I am a member of that oppressed working class. My very ability to work tirelessly hour after hour is a product of decades of better-than-average medical care, a high protein diet, and workouts in gyms that charge $400 to $500 a year. If I am now a fake productive member of the working class, it’s because I haven’t been working, in any hard physical sense, long enough to have ruined my body. But I will say this for myself, I have never employed a cleaning person or service (except, on two occasions, to prepare my house for a short-term tenant) even though various partners and husbands have badgered me over the years to do so. When I could have used one, when the kids were little, I couldn’t afford it, and later when I could afford it, I found the idea repugnant. Partly this comes from having a mother who believed that a self-cleaned house was the hallmark of womanly virtue. Partly it’s because my own normal work is sedentary, so that the housework I do--in dabs or fifteen minutes here and thirty minutes there--functions as a break. Bust mostly I rejected the idea, even after all my upper-middle class friends had, guiltily and as covertly as possible, hired help for themselves, because this is just not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human being.

Some Thurday night thoughts.

House Church

Two friends of mine, Jeremy Olson and LT have been talking about putting together a house church all summer. Now the talking has started and they are meeting tonight in about ten minutes to talk with others. Sounds cool. Pray for them if you are reading this.

WKRP Episodes Changed to Avoid Prohibabtive RIAA Royalties

2) WHY WAS THE MUSIC REPLACED?
The simple answer is: Money. The reason WKRP was shot on videotape (unlike the other MTM sitcoms like "Bob Newhart" and "Mary Tyler Moore," which were on film) was that it was the only way they could afford to use a lot of real rock songs on the show. At the time, ASCAP had a different licensing arrangement for taped shows than for filmed shows; licensing the music for WKRP cost something like half of what it would have cost had it been filmed.
Well, the music licenses expired by the time the show was being prepared for re-distribution in the mid-'90s, and by then ASCAP no longer had a "discount" for videotaped shows. Also by then, the cost of licensing songs had skyrocketed across the board. So it would have been prohibitively expensive for the distributor to re-license all the songs used on the show. They certainly could have done a better job of replacing the songs they couldn't pay for, but it was inevitable that some of the songs would be gone due to rising costs, and that's all there is to it.
Strangely enough, sometimes music has been replaced even when it was generic music to begin with! Generic music was occasionally used on the show, mainly for fake commercials, but since the new distributors probably no longer knew exactly where some of that generic music came from (and since even stuff from a music library has to be paid for), they frequently replaced it with generic music from their own music library. This of course is not as bad as replacing real music, but I'll note it when it happens.

Link via Boing, Boing

TheOoze Blog Directory

Some of you may not know this but TheOoze has started a blog section of it's famed directory of sites and I know that a lot of you fall into oozy type categories. Head over there now and add your blog.

Making Sense of Church by Spencer Burke

I think most of you that TheOoze's Spencer Burke has a new book out called Making Sense of Church. It is now shipping from Amazon.com, Amazon.ca or you can buy a signed copy from Spencer himself (how cool is that). Here are a couple of quotes from the book. Spencer Burke talks about the transition from teacher to facilitator.

As I think about the emerging church; I see a similar shift occuring. In most traditional churches, the pastor's role is to teach. As the fount of all knowledge, the pastor's job is to overflow with spiritual truth each week while the congregation sits and absorbs this wisdom. Sure, there are other elements in a service--like music and prayer but for the most part, the sermon is the focal point.

With so much riding on the weekly message, churches are susceptible to "charismatic" leaders--for better or for worse. Each Sunday, the pastor must deliver something new and inspirational to the congregation, lest he or she become the topic of conversation at lunch. As the name on the marquee outside, the pastor is inextricably linked to the success and failure of the church.

In many ways, the modern worship service is a thinly disguised university lecture. Congregants file in, face the front and frantically take notes while and established scholar--a spiritual giant in their midst--passes on formula for a more fulfilling life.
Spencer goes on to say...
Somehow, over the centuries, knowledge has become king. We've effectively said that knowing about God will utimately help us know God. As a result, we often focused more on the Word, then on the Word become flesh. And yet as A.W. Tozer pointed out, God cannot be contained in any object or that object will become out god. Cold it be that we've created an idol and have actually begun to worship Christian education or the Bible?

Churches today have been expressly designed for passing on knowledge. Objects that appeal to the senses have been removed, Ironically, this switch to a "user-friendly" enviroment is problematic for many postmodern people--the very people churches say they want to reach. While there is something to be said for comfortable chairs and trouble free parking, slick worship services seem exactly that--slick. It's Amway with a thin spiritual veneer.

Thom S. Rainer, dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism, and Church Growth at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, told The Washington Times that the main reason people leave church is it's too similar to their everyday lives. Could it be the seeker-sensitive movement has actually backfired?

He also says this about postmodernity and modernism

I think it's important to understand, too, that postmodernism isn't about critiquing modernism. Whether or not we realize it, some of what we've called "doctrines" or "truths" over the years are, in fact, cultural interpretations. In many ways, many of the church's messages today are similar but far from identifical to those preached by Martin Luther. By the same token, the messages preached by Luther were similar but certainly not indentical to those upheld by Constantine.

Our understanding of Christianity has morphed and changed down through the centuries, in large part dependent on the church's cultural contexts. Political and economic factors have shaped our understanding. As a result, I believe we need to risk exposing some of our most cherished beliefs tothe light, trusting that no matter whose face is revealed on hte coin, we'll be able to continue the journey.

While examining our beliefs and practices in a good start, any serious evaluation of our faith must challenge our subconsious beliefs. Business author Peter Senge writes of mental models--the "deeply ingrained assumption, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence the world and how we take action." In his book The Fifth Discipline, Senge points hout how powerful these images can be.

Many new insights fail to get put into practice in business--or the church--because they conflict with these deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting.

If you haven't checked it out already, the Making Sense of Church website can be found here.

RIAA sues 66-year-old dyslexic retired schoolteacher

via Boing, Boing

New York Times story on the odd tale of 66-year-old sculptor and retired schoolteacher Sarah Ward, who received notice she was being sued by the RIAA (the case has since been dropped, but the RIAA reserves the right to sue again):
Mrs. Ward was deeply confused by the accusations, which have disrupted her gentle life in the suburbs of Boston. She does not trade music, she says, does not have any younger music-loving relatives living with her, and does not use her computer for much more than sending e-mail and checking the tides. Even then, her husband does the typing. "I'm a very much dyslexic person who has not actually engaged using the computer as a tool yet," she explained in her first interview about the case. (...)
In a number of the 261 lawsuits the industry has filed so far, members of the household other than the named defendant might have had access to the machines, she said. But some of those being sued, she added, are contending that their cases are purely ones of mistaken identity.
That is exactly what Mrs. Ward says happened to her. Not only does nobody else use her computer in more than a passing way, the computer, an Apple Macintosh, is not even capable of running the KaZaA file-swapping program. And though the lawsuit against her said that she was heavily into the works of hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg, Ms. Ward says her musical tastes run to Celtic and folk.

Seth Godin has some more on the RIAA's reaction on his blog.

Blogger and DotEasy

Apparently DotEasy isn't going to work with Blogger any longer. DotEasy doesn't support passive FTP while Blogger only transfers files via passive FTP. (I suppose it is only a coincidence that DotEasy is now offering and advertising Moveable Type as part of their enhanced service). If you are looking for a good ISP to host your blog, PrairieFusion has been doing a lot of that lately. If you are interested, let me know at coop AT prairiefusion DOT com or track down the intrepid Leighton at lt AT prairiefusion DOT com

Last night

I found out that my Tigger shirt is not nearly as cool as Wendy told me it was and apparently that I have a fairly nice sounding guitar. If I only knew how to play it...

Worship Freehouse

Amanda, Cathy, Mike, and Todd came by the house tonight to put the finishing touches on the next Worship Freehouse and I think it will be the best one yet. I am really excited. We are learning lots in the process of figuring out how to connect to God in worship and I am starting to realize that the journey towards God on a Sunday night starts a long time before we ever walk into the Bassment. Maybe one can't lead worship, maybe worship comes after a long walk in community and is an expression of the journey rather than a stop along the way.

If you are interested in seeing what we are up to, check out the Worship Freehouse's website at www.worshipfreehouse.com.